Vandalism on Collaborative Web Communities: An Exploration of Editorial Behaviour in Wikipedia

Alkharashi, A. and Jose, J. (2018) Vandalism on Collaborative Web Communities: An Exploration of Editorial Behaviour in Wikipedia. In: 5th Spanish Conference on Information Retrieval (CERI '18), Zaragoza, Spain, 26-27 Jun 2018, ISBN 9781450365437 (doi: 10.1145/3230599.3230608)

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Abstract

Modern online discussion communities allow people to contribute, sometimes anonymously. Such flexibility sometimes threatens the reputation and reliability of community-owned resources. Such flexibility is understandable, however, they engender threats to the reputation and reliability in collective goods. Since not a lot of previous work addressed these issues it is important to study the aforementioned issues to build an innate understanding of recent ongoing vandalism of Wikipedia pages and ways to preventing those. In this study, we consider the type of activity that the anonymous users carry out on Wikipedia and also contemplate how others react to their activities. In particular, we want to study vandalism of Wikipedia pages and ways of preventing this kind of activity. Our preliminary analysis reveals (~ 90%) of the vandalism or foul edits are done by unregistered users in Wikipedia due to nature of openness. The community reaction seemed to be immediate: most vandalisms were reverted within five minutes on an average. Further analysis shed light on the tolerance of Wikipedia community, reliability of anonymous users revisions and feasibility of early prediction of vandalism.

Item Type:Conference Proceedings
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Jose, Professor Joemon and Alkharashi, Abdulwhab
Authors: Alkharashi, A., and Jose, J.
College/School:College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
ISBN:9781450365437
Copyright Holders:Copyright © 2018 The Authors
Publisher Policy:Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher

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